The return of Back It Up Wednesday.

[temporus]

This is my weekly* reminder folks, especially you writers out there, BACK UP YOUR DATA.

Yeah, you should be doing it regularly.  You should be doing it automatically.  But maybe you got out of habit.  Or your thumb drive is full.  Or the software went FUBAR, and you meant to get around to fixing that.

Back it up.

Don't wait for tomorrow.   Don't wait to do it later.   Do it now.  Make sure you've got your important files somewhere other than on that one single computer.   Make sure you know where the INSTALL files for your software are too.  Where is your MS Office install DVD? Where do you have your download for Scrivener?   What other apps are critical for you to work?   Where's the install media? 

What's that?  Your DVD is four years out of date, and you've just been using the "update" feature online?   That's fine as it goes, but maybe it's time to download the latest install so you have a copy that can save you a lot of time later.  What about license keys?  Does the software require it?   Do you have them somewhere available at a moment's notice?   How about putting them all in an email to yourself, tagged and placed in a folder of your online email account.   Does it mean if your email gets hacked, your license key could be compromised?   Sure.   If whomever hacks your email wants it for anything more than to snag a copy of your address book and forward off more viruses and spam to everyone therein.

Things happen.  Computers crash.  Hard drives go belly up.  Software corrupts the file you've been slaving over for two months.   Backups prevent heartache.  Backups save hours of toil.  Backups bring peace of mind.

So, when did you last backup your data?

Comments

[etcet.livejournal.com]

1. Cloud services (dropbox, google docs, etc) are handy
2. Free, automated backup services (I use CrashPlan, which is free if your backups are made between your own computers, or your computers and your friends', and not to their servers)

[temporus.livejournal.com]

Cloud services are great. Especially the free ones. :) But, caveat emptor. Free things tend to be free for a reason. And of course, you have to trust your cloud provider.

CrashPlan sounds good. I'll have to check it out.

Just remember, files alone aren't the only thing you need to be prepared to recover from. You need to think about software license keys, install media, etc too. Naturally, you can go with Cloud services for the software side of things as well...but to date, most cloud services are lacking in comparison to locally installed software. I expect that trend to change over the course of the next decade, but it's going to take some time before it does.

Personally, I like local software because I *want* to be disconnected when I write as much as possible. The temptation to click "one more link" while "researching" is all too strong. If I'm not online, I can't spend hours on Wikipedia and Google doing web searches on details that probably will get cut in revision once I realize I don't even need that entire scene.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

true, true. i have a lot of media, but i have also been moving towards free tools (open office instead of microsoft office, for instance), and while i may not have the media for those, they're readily available or present on one of the several computers at my place (the only situation in which i'm likely to lose all of my computers is a house fire, and even then, i might have time to grab one or more of them)

[temporus.livejournal.com]

Tried Open Office, several times over the years. Just never worked for me. But it's good as a backup in case you miss out on MS Office. Instead, I decided to make the jump to Scrivener. I think it caused me some loss of productivity as I tried to mentally adjust, but now, I feel like I'm almost back up to speed.

Of course, with the Editor hat on, I tend to prefer Word. OO does a decent job, but on rare occasion, I find things coming up odd with OO, that are fine with Word. Odd, but it happens.

[jongibbs.livejournal.com]

Yesterday :)